what domain to choose?

A small guide to help you choose your ideal domain or one that best suits your website.

An Internetdomain is one of the central factors that determine the success of a website for the public, and the choice of the right name must be preceded by several hypotheses and relatively objective considerations.
Therefore, it is not possible to indicate a uniform procedure without first carefully interviewing the customer who will be using it.
However, we will supply some guidelines to help clarify some ideas for those who are searching for the ideal name.

And, although we will give you some indications to base your reflections on, we do not want to be restrictive of other considerations that you could make, since your choice is definitely subjective.

The protagonist of our illustration will be Joe Schmoe, owner of Joe Schmoe Ltd, and in desperate need of a name for his website so that he can publish information about his retail shoes.

The obvious choice: my name!

This is obviously the first line of reasoning of anyone who is about to register their own domain or that of their company, so of course the first name Joe will try is: joeschmoe.com!

In an ideal world, the domain would be available and waiting for Joe, but in reality, this is not the case because unfortunately the majority of the most common domain names (actual names, names present in the vocabulary, acronyms with few characters, etc.) have already been registered and therefore the choice may be difficult for someone who has chosen a common name for their business.

Our friend Joe will have to find an alternative that is equally valid and and if all the others are already registered, he may be forced to register joeschmoeltd.com or joeschmoe-ltd.com, or yet still, company-joeschmoe-ltd.com, with disastrous consequences in terms of memory recall.

exploring the field of semantics

The suggestion that should be given to Joe is to affiliate with his name, one or more keywords related to his activity (for example joeshoes.com, joe-boots.com and any variants that involve the reversal of the order of words and/or the addition of hyphens), which will be very useful, both in terms of search engine indexing and in attracting more visitors.

Search engines, in fact, attach great importance to the keywords in a domain and position the sites that contain them higher in the results than sites with the same features but without keywords.

This factor is so important today that many people prefer not to include their name in the domain and instead include only one (or more, but without exaggerating) keyword that is believed to be used for the search; so behind a site like www.thebigshoe.com, could be a company called Crawford Ltd, which for indexing purposes prefer to present themselves on the web with this type of "sign".

Yes, sign, because in fact, we must remember that our domain name can have the same function as a shop sign on the street, and since Joe would not attract many customers with a "Joe Ltd" sign, he would be better off with something like, "everything for shoes".

a little bit of imagination!

It is likely that the two situations discussed would not be appropriate for certain types of sites for various reasons, the most common being the lack of names that can be registered in the semantic field. But there may be some who suggest using a name that has nothing to do with the business name or the product/service that the site will offer.

In these cases it is creative inspiration that needs to guide us, so any advice would be out of place. But the most striking examples can be seen by two of the most famous search engines in the world: Google e Yahoo!.

Neither name makes one think, in any way, of the services they provide, but are apparently names of pure imagination and do not mean anything (in reality both have meanings although unknown to most people), yet they have had tremendous success among users and have been easy to remember.

let's not forget about the extension!

Up to now we have been concerned only with the domain name and we have not given any weight to the extension which may have a crucial role in choosing the correct name for the site.

The extension is the suffix of each internet domain, which can be .it, .com, .eu and many others that mostly represent the ISO codes of each country in the world (IT for Italia, FR for France, BR for Brazil, etc.) but also other extensions that may represent a category (.TRAVEL for tour operators, .PRO for professionals, .COOP for cooperatives, .GOV.IT for public administrations, etc.) or other generic domains (.COM, .NET, .TEL, etc.) that only vaguely indicate an area of expertise but have no restriction on registration requirements.

The extension, as stated before, may have different uses.

The first thing that catches someone's attention is the geographical location of our site; we will naturally think that a .es site is a Spanish company, right?... Wrong! Or rather, not necessarily, because if our friend Joe would like to expand his user base and sell his footwear to Spanish customers as well, he could easily register his domain zapatos.es (zapatos means shoes in Spanish), put it on a Spanish speaking website to make sure the new user does not have any translation problems, and thus create a kind of "Spanish branch" with relatively little effort and without leaving his shop in Florence, Italy.

On the contrary, if he would like to accentuate the nature of his Tuscany (Toscana in Italian) region, and thus capitalize on what "made in Italy" represents around the world, he could opt for a regional third level domain like shoesjoe.toscana.it or if addressed to an international user, joeshoes.tuscany.it, which are regional third level domains that will certainly be free (since they are not well-known, which does not mean they are less valid than the more high profile .com, etc.) and will be far more effective than others in terms of completely indexing its Italian products.

With extensions you can also make a play on words that can make the site name more appealing and just to give some examples (and here too, the imagination is what guides the choice, so every suggestion is only indicative) with existing sites: www.scarpo.ne (scarpone are a type of shoe, and NE is the extension for Niger), www.mocassi.no (mocassino are mocassin or loafers, and NO is the Norwegian domain) and so on, for available extensions all over the world.

On our website - whose name might seem like it is from the company name, Dominiando Srl, but instead is derived from the analysis of domain semantic fields mixed with a bit of imagination to find a name that was not banal, and only at a later stage the company became Dominiando Srl - you will find the widest availability of adjustable extensions to use so you can find the most suitable name for your website, whether for personal use or for your business.

We also think about tomorrow!

Anyone who is about to undertake a new activity hopes it will grow in time and become popular among internet users. If we truly believe in our business, however, it is necessary to take steps right away to preserve our new "sign" on the internet for the future.

For example, if Joe thinks he would like to follow the French market in the near future because he thinks that his product has a certain appeal in that country, he has to block (and perhaps leave it unused until he uses it) the domain joeshoes.fr (or the name he has chosen for his site) so that tomorrow he doesn't find himself caught off guard by a dishonest competitor or a cybersquatter who has already registered his domain, benefiting from the reputation Joe has built up with so much time, sweat and money!

With the brand protection service, "Domains Anywhere", our company can advise you on how to secure your name and register your site in every country by administering all your domains with a single control panel, unifying all the technical, administrative and bureaucratic management, dealing with a single partner in your individual language, currency and working hours.

We hope we have given you some helpful hints on how to choose your domain, and we wish all of you a pleasant search, especially our dear friend Joe!